Kavanaugh Defies ‘Partisan Shock Trooper’ Label

If Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a “partisan shock trooper in a black robe waging an ideological battle,” he has an odd way of showing it.

Judge Kavanaugh, a George W. Bush appointee who earned that epithet Sunday from Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, just came out with a ruling that upends the legitimacy of one of the Bush administration’s signature war-on-terror cases. He wrote the opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit throwing out the conviction at a military commission of former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan.

Mr. Pearlstein, to be sure, was mainly writing about Judge Kavanaugh’s environmental-law rulings, in particular his decision blocking regulations that try to prevent states from dumping pollution on one another.

Still, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist painted Judge Kavanaugh as committed to the conservative cause, noting that the judge assisted Ken Starr in investigating President Bill Clinton and worked in the Bush White House before his appointment to the bench.

As we have observed before, Judge Kavanaugh, 47, is one of a group of relatively young jurists with conservative pedigrees who would likely get a look for the Supreme Court if Mitt Romney were elected president and had an opening to fill. If it came to that, today’s ruling could help Judge Kavanaugh’s supporters portray him as a judge who follows the law as he sees it, without regard to ideology.

Judge Kavanaugh also had a role in the challenge to President Barack Obama’s health-care law, writing a dissent at the D.C. Circuit that said the case wasn’t yet ripe for adjudication. That cautious position, which supported neither side in the ideologically charged dispute, was ultimately rejected by all nine Supreme Court justices, who agreed that the case was ready to decide.

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